IBM won a tactical victory Friday in a legal battle with SCO Group when a judge ordered SCO to show within 30 days the Linux software to which it believes it has rights and to point out where it believes IBM is infringing.

Even if SCO shows a single line of code that it believes is infringing, it then has the leverage to ask the court to compel IBM to release *all* of the code that IBM contributed to Linux so that SCO can do a complete examination.

Except that this is not all that SCO is asking for. It's asking for the entire AIX source code. IBM has already produced a lot of what they were asked to produce, but SCO's demands are unreasonable. They are being overly broad, and at the same time refuse to be specific in providing what they are being asked to. That's not a winning strategy - that's tactical stalling, so that the price of their stock remains high.

SCO is a publicly traded company. If MS were involved beyond a licensing agreement, SCO would be required by law to disclose the financial arrangements. Unlike a private company, SCO can't keep those things private. But it hasn't happened. Which means that MS ain't involved. Get it?

MS ain't directly involved, that's for sure. But that's investment companies and PIPEs are for - Baystar Capital isn't required by law to disclose who participates in a PIPE such as the one that injected 50M$ into SCO. They say that MS wasn't involved in that particular one, but they could be twisting the truth on this.

If MS wants to funnel money to SCO without anyone finding out (at least for a while), there are means at their disposal.

Roberto

Yes I am ready to give SCO the benefit of the doubt because yes I do believe there is some form of copyright infringement in Linux. It exists with large corporations and the larger a code base grows, the harder it is to say you are 100% certain that infringements do not exist.

Agreed. However, this is just a possibility, not a certainty, and if one is to consider Linux-the-kernel, there is a rather strict system of checks and balances similar to the one you propose. So to me, the probability that SCO is right is lesser than the probability that SCO receives support (direct or indirect) from MS. But of course I could be wrong - we'll have more info in 30 days, I suppose...